


Netheia

by dmwrites



Category: Original Work
Genre: Eye Trauma, Gen, Horror, Spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-03 08:06:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12744357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dmwrites/pseuds/dmwrites
Summary: No one knows the truth behind the tragedy of Netheia. Very few even care anymore, but a curious man cannot resist the urge to go and see for himself what was last discovered.





	Netheia

**Author's Note:**

> “your eyes are just like black spiders” is the first line of an elbow song called “powder blue”. they didn't mean it literally, of course, but it still managed to haunt me enough to have me listen to the [remix](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh6xeXsA1Rk) on repeat while writing this, and, well. you'll see what that led to.
> 
> besides that little hint, i have no idea how to warn for this without outright saying what happens in the story. feel free to look at the end notes where i've briefly described the scene to see if you'd wanna read about it in more details. if you'd rather skip this one and wait for my next story, you're absolutely welcome to do that.
> 
> many thanks to curly for taking a look at this before i posted!
> 
>  
> 
> **read on my blog:**  
>  [ Netheia](https://mirthblade.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/netheia/)

“Why are you so obsessed with Netheia?” his wife asked him when he told her he wanted to see the newest find for himself.

“It's not an obsession”, he muttered, and he was relieved she didn't give him the same look everyone else had. She was a little confused, but she was smiling, and he loved her smile so much, wanted to keep it from being overcome by worry. “It's just an interest like any other. We're only so intense about it because it's that fascinating.”

“We?”

“Oh.” He chuckled, embarrassed. “It's like a club, sort of. Just a bunch of nerds who want to know what really happened.”

“It was just a village, honey,” she said and directed her attention to her book again. “It all happened long ago, probably wasn't that hard to pillage it.”

“Probably,” he said. “But there's not enough evidence to support anything. We honestly don't know why so many people died.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

“There weren't any survivors?”

“There were, but none of them lived for long after, and didn't make much sense in their last days.”

“Sounds like some sort of disease,” she said, nervousness slipping into her tone for the first time.

“There's no evidence to support that, either,” he reassured her. He paused, wondering how to convince her. “They aren't even telling us what they found last.”

“They're doing that for publicity.”

“Of course they are.”

“And you still think it's worth going?”

“Of course I do.”

She smiled and shook her head. “Okay.”

“Okay?” He sat down next to her. “So you'll come with me?”

“Yeah, sure. You got me curious.” She tilted her head to the side. “This is really important to you, isn't it?”

“Yes,” he said.

She took his hand. “Then I wanna be there with you.”

“You won't...” He shook his head. “You might regret it. For all we know, it could be really boring.”

She laughed. “I'll survive.”

 

And so they took time off work to visit the Grand Museum of Netheia, which hardly lived up to its name. After signing a puzzling agreement that he was fully responsible of his health conditions and actions that followed his examination of the latest artifact, he was allowed access to it. He walked into the room and froze.

It was a mirror.

A goddamn mirror.

He huffed and put his hands on his hips, peered at the reflection of a fucking idiot in front of him. His eyes looked even more tired than usual in the dim light of the small room, his clothes more rumpled than they had any right to be. He didn't know who he should be more pissed at: the museum staff for swindling him, or himself for falling for it.

He took a step closer. What would a fucking mirror tell him about the death of Netheia? About all the lives lost there, all the minds sickened even after people managed to escape the cursed place? What was so dangerous about a sheet of glass?

He was already planning a more productive holiday they could have with the rest of their time in town as he reached forward. He wanted to trace his fingers over the frame to see if there wasn't anything engraved his eyes could be missing, but all thought paused the second he came into contact with the mirror.

Something heavy settled onto the top of his head; another invisible touch grasped his chin and pulled him forward. He braced the hand he'd stretched against the mirror and tried to pull away, but whatever had its hold on him wouldn't let go. He stared at his reflection, breathless and panicked. A noise of desperation was steadily crawling its way up his throat. He idly wondered if they had a camera in the room, if someone was watching him struggle, if they had somehow done a trick on him. He took a deep breath through his nose to see if he could smell some type of gas they could have drugged him with, and to his surprise he caught a whiff of something that he could only associate with _ruin_. He took another breath and he could almost taste it, like he had tried to eat something only to discover it had started spoiling, decomposing. He gagged, and to his surprise the cough made him hit his head against the glass, the hold on him releasing as suddenly as it had appeared. He braced himself against the mirror and he stared, taken over by a sudden urge to either break it or to turn back and run, when something caught his attention.

It was a single flicker at first, barely noticeable, but he couldn't miss it, close as he was. A tiny red dot had appeared in his left pupil. He turned his head and moved from side to side to see if it might be some sort of light coming from behind the mirror, but it never moved. It blinked a few times and soon a second one joined it. Then another one. And another one. In a moment there were eight of them, blinking at random intervals.

Before he figured out what they were, he felt a sort of _tingling_ in his eye. It was almost like his eyeball was going numb. His breath stuttered again at the idea that something may be tampering with his eyesight. He stifled a scream when he felt his eye _jerk_ against the socket housing it  
Time seemed to slow while he watched, terrified, as something dark and fuzzy broke out of his iris and wiggled in the air. He did not feel pain, but he could feel it _move_ , and a desperate shout tore its way out of his throat when he felt more _things_ make their way to the surface of his eye. They were more of the same fuzzy appendages, reaching around like a bug on its back helplessly waving its legs.

As if the thought wasn’t bad enough, the realization that it was not far from the truth came right after. The little lights blinked as one and pushed forward, and through the haze of terror and disgust he couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that something very similar to a spider was breaking out of his eye. It emerged and felt around until its legs found purchase on his lower eyelid, then pulled until it popped out, dragging his eye—now a part of its body—along. He could still see through the empty eye socket as the spider crawled down his face and over his mouth; he pursed his lips, damned if he’d let this thing inside his mouth, but  then he tasted rot again and gagged. The spider, unimpressed with his suffering, wasted no time making its way over his tongue and down his throat. A silken strand of nerves dragged behind it, tucking between his teeth like floss without leaving them any cleaner.

He pushed back and fell on his knees and coughed, praying to all the gods that ever were that he would throw up, that he would expel this—this _thing_ out of his body, but it marched on with no mercy, scratching at his insides until he thought he would die from sheer disgust alone. Finally, it lodged itself somewhere near his heart and settled. He fell forward, panting against the floor, and hoped it would open up and bury him.

He didn’t know how long he stayed there. The next thing he was aware of was a security guard shaking him awake, a docent talking to him, a familiar voice outside—his wife.

“No,” he said, “No, don’t let her come in here.”

“Honey?” she said as she appeared in the doorframe. “My goodness, what happened to him?”

“Get _out_ ,” he roared, and the security guard rose to keep her away. They thought he was the one dangerous to her. _Good,_ he thought. If it would keep her away from the damn mirror, he was glad for it.

“He’s my husband,” she grit through her teeth and pushed the guard away. She got to him and reached for him, not even looking in the mirror’s direction.

He took her hand with gratitude and let her embrace him once he was up. “What happened?” she asked, but he just shook his head.

“Let’s just get out of here,” he said and leaned on her as they walked.

She called a taxi and gave the driver directions to their hotel, but she didn’t get in.

“You’re not coming?”

“I just wanna talk to them,” she explained and wiped the sweat off his brow. “Are you gonna be okay? I’ll only be a few minutes.”

He hesitated before he gave her a nod. “Don’t go in there,” he pleaded with her. She frowned but she nodded and gave him a kiss before she stepped away. He pressed a hand to his mouth and closed his eyes, trying to convince himself that his wife hadn’t just put her lips where the spider had walked.

He ignored the driver’s warning about him paying double if he threw up in the car.

 

He managed to keep his stomach’s contents until he reached the hotel. He wasn’t fortunate enough to reach the bathroom, though, the nausea rising just as he’d sat on his bed. Al he could do was reach for the vase on the bedside table and let the flowers fall to the floor as his vomit splashed in the stale water.

His wife found him on the floor there, leaning his forehead on his knees.

“Are you well?” she asked him.

“Yeah, I guess,” he said, voice weak. “Better. I think they did something. Something in the air or whatever. I got these hallucinations—”

“They did not do anything,” she said with certainty.

“Did you ask them?”

“No.”

He gave her a long look.

“You went inside.”

“Yes.”

“Why would you?” he asked her. He didn’t even have the strength to get angry. He got up with some effort. She didn’t offer to help him.

When he took a step closer to her, she made no move to either back away or close the distance between them. She just stared.

“Did you see it?”

“I saw more than you did,” she said.

He frowned. “What does that mean?” She didn’t reply. “We need to break it,” he decided. Fuck the museum. Whatever it was, whatever they were doing, they wouldn’t be able to lure people with the mirror if it was gone. Fuck them all. And fuck Netheia. Fuck the mystery.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“No.” She frowned and closed her eyes for a moment, hand reaching up to feel around her head. He noticed for the first time that her hands were red, and now the blood was transferring to her hair. She was touching the same place he had felt the weight, except when she did it she looked like she was adjusting a crown.

Her eyes met his again, and she took a step closer to him. “You could not bear it,” she told him, and her voice was softer, but when she reached to cup his face it wasn't a comfort. He resisted the urge to flinch away, keep her tainted hands away from him. “I can. I will find others who can help me set it free.”

“Set what free?” he sputtered. “Honey, don’t—”

“Everything will be alright,” she told him with a smile, but there was no warmth in it anymore. “You can go now.”

“Go?”

She nodded.

“They are waiting for you.”

It took him a moment to process these words, to have confusion, fear and guilt rise up in him all at once, but her hands sliding and twisting to snap his neck spared him from all that was to come.

 

**Author's Note:**

> spoilery warnings: someone's eye turns into a spider which then crawls into their mouth and down their throat. another thing that occurs is murder by the snapping of one's neck.
> 
> i haven't written anything like this before. the keikaku* was to have you go Ew Gross, Cool Though. sorry if the latter part was kinda lost.
> 
> *keikaku means plan.
> 
>  
> 
> **read my other stories:**  
> [you wish](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12445152)  
> [to_katie](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11600445)  
> [the fall show](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11290392)
> 
>  
> 
> follow me on twitter: [dmwrites](https://twitter.com/dmwrites)


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